It is no coincidence that the rhetorical content and tone are so similar. Although the first is the better educated, and probably the more open of the two, they both spring from the same ideological poisoned well. If you want a vision of their future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. Castro did not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; he made a revolution in order to establish his dictatorship.

Both are embittered atheists, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him but they know that whoever controls the past controls the future and whoever controls the present controls the past. That is why Castro says, “The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs,” while here we only turn them over to the liberals. Power lovers without power who can hold two contradictory beliefs in their mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.

Bohning has produced a record of an epic failure in American foreign policy that was the direct result of a policy of accommodation fostered by timidity that has allowed the intellectual plague of Marxism to finally wash up on our own shores just as surely as the yellow fever used to arrive from Cuba on ships. Unfortunately neither the author nor anyone in the American establishment seem to realize that the answer is never in half measures half heartedly carried out.

At the height of the Cold War, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations made removing Fidel Castro’s regime one of their highest foreign policy priorities. The Castro Obsession provides new insight into the bold U.S. covert war against Cuba that lasted from 1959 until 1965. Eisenhower and Kennedy’s fervent desire to get rid of Castro led to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, but the efforts to oust his regime did not end there. It became an obsession.

Primarily through the CIA and the military, the United States resorted to economic and political destabilization, propaganda, sabotage, hit-and-run raids, and assassination plots to try to topple the regime. This secret war was one of the most wide-ranging, sustained, expensive, and ultimately futile covert action campaigns in history.

Was this secret war wise, and did it ultimately promote U.S. interests? Don Bohning says no. Even if the details were murky, the extreme American pressure on Cuba was apparent to all, and this heavy-handedness severely damaged the U.S. image in Latin America and much of the Third World.

Instead of ridding the hemisphere of a dictator, these efforts increased his international political fame and provided him the excuse for more repression in Cuba. U.S. attempts to overthrow Castro also had dire unintended consequences, such as contributing to the Soviet decision to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, which produced the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War. Bohning sheds new light on this covert war, revealing that it was even more extensive, risky, and long-lived than previously thought.